Since the broadcasting of the Breakout documentary promoting one version of the 1983 escape from the H Blocks, there has been a flurry of discussion probing the wisdom behind televising a seriously divisive topic in a manner that for many was indistinguishable from propaganda. Whatever the motives of the Hot Shot producers in making it or the BBC in showing it they could not have expected an easy ride in the court of public opinion. They took a chance and it remains to be seen if over time it will work out for them. We will see either a situation where a partisan approach to documentary production flows more freely, or a tightening of the reins where nothing can be made without everyone being appeased; a bit like the appointment of the four victim commissioners.
There is little doubt that the programme makers traded in all objectivity for interviews and a camera positioned on the approved inside track. Bobby Storey speaking at length on TV in the wake of the many allegations that have linked him to a spate of Provisional operations would carry major appeal, even for the Peeping Tom Free Presbyterians watching from behind their fingers while convincing themselves that Storey’s horns must be hidden in the same place as Northern Bank notes.
The narrative of the escape was moulded almost entirely by the prisoners. Given that any perspective other than their own would have been anathema to at least two of the escapees interviewed, the price of their participation was always going to be a heavily tendentious piece of work. Few outside Sinn Fein – where delusion is the done thing - fool themselves that the three escapees appointed by Sinn Fein to speak are not completely on message cogs in the party machine. When it turns they turn. It is inconceivable that they would have assented to being interviewed were the final product going to challenge their narrative.
The sheer preponderance of the prisoner perspective meant that Hot Shot could never seriously have purported to tell the complete story of the 1983 escape, but merely to have told one of the stories associated with the escape. Not much wrong with that if it is stated as such and not spun as something else. And because that story is a crucially important one it remains a precious contribution to public understanding.
‘Kelly shoots Adams’ would make a great news line in radically different circumstances. But the shooting of prison officer John Adams was never going to scale those heights in terms of newsworthiness. Since the documentary I have read repeatedly that Gerry Kelly described how he fired the shots that felled Adams in the control room of H7 shortly after the prisoners seized control of the block. It is possible I missed something through being momentarily distracted but I do not recall Kelly making any such admission. I came away feeling that this was where careful narratorial management of the shooting showed the extent to which the programme makers were complicit in presenting the prisoners’ account. If my recollection is right Kelly’s account was punctuated by the intervention of the documentary’s narrator who made the admission of firing the two shots on his behalf and then Kelly picked up again almost seamlessly from where the narrator left off.
This is not to say the programme makers were wholly opportunistic in what they did. They may well believe that a multiplicity of voices is needed to explain any social phenomenon, although not necessarily to be voiced at the one time; that it was essential to public understanding that the whole story be told even if in incremental fashion where societal knowledge is increased broadcast by broadcast; that any previous gaps be filled hole by hole; that no event can be adequately explained without the input of those who made it happen.
Where such an ethos has been undermined is in the decision of Hot Shot to solicit prison officer Campbell Courtney to participate. It is not that his contribution was less authentic than that of the escapees. He was there on the day, bravely pursued armed prisoners on foot from the tally lodge, himself unarmed, and was shot in the leg for his troubles. Although he spoke very well his role was always going to be a cameo one. He did not appear as the phantom purposefully picked to inject a sour note into the opera. His was a harmonising chord which accentuated the performance of the three virtuosi. Subsequently the cover of objectivity which it afforded those who constructed Breakout was at best threadbare.
Better had they pleaded special circumstance and then moved to carry it off through simply stating from the outset that they were not searching for objectivity but instead were going down the dangerous route of allowing the escape to be told though the eyes of those who pulled it off. Their task was to add to public understanding by ensuring that the voices which helped shape a major event in recent Irish history were vented. What those tasked with frustrating the escape thought was material for another day.
The success of Breakout lay in its presentation of the escapees in no light other than their own. Where it failed was that through the inclusion of a token voice as an also-ran it sought to depict balance rather than inject any.
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